Jake Gyl­len­haal takes on the Tal­iban in the first trail­er for The Covenant

It’s uncom­mon but not unheard of for a direc­tor to pre­mière two fea­ture films in the space of a cal­en­dar year, but in the Unit­ed States, Guy Ritchie​‘s going to do the likes of Hong Sang-soo one bet­ter by releas­ing new films in con­sec­u­tive months. Oper­a­tion For­tune (which was sup­posed to be out in 2022, but was held due to stu­dio anx­i­eties about run­ning a movie fea­tur­ing Ukrain­ian vil­lains while the coun­try was under siege by Rus­sia) is going to be in Amer­i­can cin­e­mas come March, and a thriller in the midst of a dif­fer­ent war will be along short­ly after­ward in April.

The first trail­er for The Covenant arrived online today, putting Ritchie in a more straight-faced tone than we’ve seen from his recent string of lad­dish gang­ster pic­tures and IP jobs. Sit­u­at­ing a fic­tion­al tale of hero­ism and revenge dur­ing the US occu­pa­tion of Afghanistan, he strikes a polit­i­cal note not so famil­iar to his fil­mog­ra­phy of action-come­dies safe­ly ensconced with­in their genre.

Jake Gyl­len­haal por­trays Sgt. John Kin­ley, a sol­dier in the military’s anti-Tal­iban effort who nar­row­ly sur­vives an attack from ene­my com­bat­ants, his life saved by the inter­ven­tion of Afghan inter­preter Ahmed (Dar Sal­im). He car­ries the wound­ed troop across miles of desert back to safe­ty, but upon return­ing home to his wife (Emi­ly Beecham), John then learns Ahmed has not been grant­ed safe pas­sage to Amer­i­ca as promised for his ser­vice. A one-man extrac­tion mis­sion is his only hope, and John has a debt to pay.

As is the case with much of the Ritchie oeu­vre, this is guy stuff, its focus on macho themes of hon­or, vengeance, and duty time-hon­ored in the war-pic­ture tra­di­tion. But as much as he’s placed him­self in his own wheel­house, it seems Ritchie’s also veered into testy ter­ri­to­ry in terms of sub­ject mat­ter, open­ing him­self up to cri­tiques about his film’s unavoid­able stance-tak­ing on race and inter­na­tion­al relations.

But because this is a Guy Ritchie film, the real draw is the gun­play and explo­sions, the butch melo­dra­ma in the char­ac­ter work bal­anced out with raw testos­terone in the elab­o­rate­ly chore­o­graphed fight sequences. In between all his Tal­iban-smash­ing, Gyl­len­haal even gets to do the tough-guy thing of run­ning away from a det­o­na­tion with­out look­ing behind him, every actor’s great­est dream.

The Covenant comes to cin­e­mas in the US on 21 April. A date for the UK has yet to be set.